Picturing Peter Bogdanovich. Peter Tonguette
not because he felt entitled to it, but because he hadn’t always had it. In another context, he once quoted Cary Grant about the joys of staying at a hotel with all expenses paid: “The first thing you must do,” Grant told Bogdanovich, “is kick off your shoes and let a lot of minions pick them up!” The remark, Bogdanovich wrote, spoke volumes about Grant—and, perhaps, about himself: “Only someone who had to earn this comfort through hard or intense labor would make that sort of comment.”44 Similarly, At Long Last Love conjures a world of affluence and leisure in part because its writer-director finally had a taste of such things. After years of striving, didn’t he have a right to screen out poverty and drudgery? Even the name of the film’s production company reflected Bogdanovich’s ascent: Copa de Oro (Cup of Gold), after the street in Bel Air on which his house sat.
At Long Last Love has nothing of the hurried, racing feel of Bogdanovich’s other Depression-era comedy, Paper Moon, in which the just-scraping-by characters are always on the run—an appropriate choice because, as abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning is supposed to have said, “the trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.” By contrast, Michael (Reynolds), Brooke (Shepherd), Johnny (Del Prete), and Kitty (Kahn) have nothing but time, and they fill it by frequenting the racetrack, driving drunk after a night of dancing, and going shopping at Lord & Taylor. The film’s extraordinarily long takes not only capture the cast’s spirited live singing and dancing in real time but also a sense of living without pressure or deadlines. Take the scene in which Michael and Kitty sing “You’re the Top” in his high-rise apartment—following the song’s prominent use in What’s Up, Doc?, it was now something of an anthem in the films of Peter Bogdanovich: the shot begins on a close-up of champagne glasses on a tray, follows Rodney as he brings the drinks into the living room—where Michael and Kitty sit, hands entwined, on a sofa—and continues as the twosome start to move, dollying in or dollying out as the choreography permits. No cut? No hurry.
Yet Bogdanovich insists that even those who have everything are in need of something more—as Brooke says, plaintively, “What’s a million dollars without love?” Although Brooke likes Michael and Kitty likes Johnny, Michael likes Kitty and Johnny likes Brooke—a state of romantic dissatisfaction beautifully evoked in “I Loved Him (but He Didn’t Love Me),” which Brooke sings about Michael and Kitty sings about Johnny during a long walk in what is supposed to be a gorgeously green Central Park.
The song repeated most often throughout the film is indeed “You’re the Top,” but the story’s actual theme is best expressed in “Friendship.” In spite of their differences, the characters come to bravely accept their unhappiness, emerging as chums at the Old 400 dance that concludes the film. There, in a magical moment, the men find themselves dancing with their ideal mate—Michael with Kitty and Johnny with Brooke—before a bandleader commands them to “change partners!” The couples oblige, the women resigning themselves to their fate. “I think she’s more lovely now than ever I see her,” Johnny tells Kitty of Brooke, who replies with a tight-lipped “Yup.” “I think she’s more beautiful now than I’ve ever seen,” Michael tells Brooke of Kitty, who replies with an even more tight-lipped “Mm-hmm.” To improve upon a line by F. Scott Fitzgerald: And so they waltz on, borne back ceaselessly… into the penthouse.
In its own way, Nickelodeon was as show-offy as At Long Last Love: in telling of the evolution of moviemaking, the story stopped in its tracks in 1915, the year of the premiere of The Birth of a Nation—because Bogdanovich himself stopped there. “Ford, Hawks, Dwan, and these other directors have already done everything, and they were all influenced by Griffith,” he told interviewers Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin in 1968. “Unless you’re some sort of primitive talent, you have to know the history of what came before to be any good.”45
In its original conception, as Bogdanovich described it to Sherman and Rubin, the project was to be set in Hollywood “from 1909 to the present” and had at its center “a Dwan-Griffith-like figure,”46 but when he finally made Nickelodeon, he had whittled down the time period to 1910 to 1915. The film, then, would chart the glory days of the silent film: its guileless beginnings up to its arrival as an art form to be reckoned with. There were solid dramatic reasons for the decision, but also personal ones: Bogdanovich would celebrate those days because they were the ones he found most useful and inspiring.
The film centers on Leo Harrigan (Ryan O’Neal), a meek attorney who—following a series of accidents and misunderstandings—is put to work for studio boss H. H. Cobb (Brian Keith). Leo starts off as a scenarist before being recruited to take over for a director on location in rural California. He is reassured by cameraman Frank Frank (John Ritter) that the job demands little: “It’s okay—any idiot can direct.”
In fact, Leo cottons to directing, but not because he thinks he is making art. Instead, the former attorney is charmed by the misfits and amateurs who make up his cast and crew, including Frank, leading man Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds), leading lady Marty (Stella Stevens), and juvenile script doctor Alice (Tatum O’Neal). And he is positively smitten with Kathleen Cooke (Jane Hitchcock), an aspiring actress who is the gang’s newest initiate. A romance develops between Leo and Kathleen—later becoming a love triangle involving Leo, Buck, and Kathleen—that has a simplicity and sweetness echoing the best of silent cinema.
In fact, Leo and Kathleen’s first meeting is a sentimentalized version of the meet cute in What’s Up, Doc? Again, Ryan O’Neal finds himself hounded by a persistent woman. The difference? Where Barbra Streisand is bossy, Jane Hitchcock is bewitching. In the scene, Leo is about to step off a trolley car, in which he has just concluded what amounts to his first story conference with Cobb, when Kathleen steps aboard and stumbles. Leo, having dropped the contents of his suitcase inside the car, does not see Kathleen on the floor, although she spots him. Kathleen, we learn momentarily, is “blind as a rat,” so her point-of-view shot of Leo (seen gathering up his things in a hurry) is appropriately fuzzy. Leo rushes past Kathleen, tuning out her repeated cries of “I beg your pardon” until after he has gotten off the car. She rushes to a window and asks if he is all right. Leo, mumbling to himself, stops in midstride. Kathleen asks, “What?” Leo says, “Lollapalooza”—Cobb had earlier asked that Leo’s story be “a real lollapalooza”—and then, “Hello.” The two speak for several moments until the car begins to pull away, the camera irising-out on Jane Hitchcock’s face as it grows tinier and tinier. This time, Ryan O’Neal wants—rather than flees from—the girl.
For much of its duration, Nickelodeon is an appealing episodic comedy, recounting the haphazard means by which movies used to be made (e.g., story lines were tailored to what material was shot rather than the other way around) and the equally unplanned ways in which they were exhibited (e.g., a movie’s reels were shown out of order and in combination with those from other movies). Many of the incidents are modeled on tales relayed to Bogdanovich by such directors as Allan Dwan, Leo McCarey (for whom Leo Harrigan is named), and Raoul Walsh. But the film ends up achieving a certain heft as it steadily builds toward one of the great scenes in Bogdanovich’s filmography: the premiere on February 8, 1915, of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the artistry and scope of which leaves Leo simultaneously inspired and depressed. He is inspired because he recognizes the significance and power of The Birth of a Nation and depressed because he also knows that his middling one- and two-reelers do not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath.
In excerpting passages of The Birth of a Nation in Nickelodeon, Bogdanovich chose not to focus on the earlier film’s virulent racism. Instead, he shows clips of its rousing battle scene and, in an impressive director’s cut of Nickelodeon that also shifted the film from color to black-and-white, the indisputably great scene in which the Little Colonel (Henry B. Walthall) arrives home and is met by his sister (Mae Marsh) on their front porch. The relatives’ delight at seeing each other turns somber when each actor gazes sadly into the distance. With its bittersweet tone—not to mention its moments of characters looking at and away from each other—this is a most Bogdanovichesque of scenes, even though it was directed by D. W. Griffith.
When The Birth of a Nation ends in Nickelodeon,